Labor Day, 2023

Today is Labor Day. We remember all work: wage earners, independent contractors, entrepreneurs, managers, clergy, and non-profit semi-volunteers. Work is done under a variety of organizations: unions, professional, and none at all. There are multiple paths to success and multiple ways to measure it.

Let’s consider this essay reprinted from Four Minute Essays published in 1919.

There Is No Laboring Class
By Dr. Frank Crane

It cannot too often be stated that the labor problem is not a class affair, but that it concerns the entire human race. There may be a class of aristocrats, of plutocrats, of criminals, of society idlers, or of any such group whose instinct is to withdraw itself from the common mass of humanity. But for laborers this is an impossibility. They remain, and must remain, part and parcel of the whole people. They are the people. There can be no laboring class. It is a contradiction of terms.

Especially is this true in America, where from the President of the country down to the coal-heaver everybody is supposed to work. So strong is this supposition, that the inference is that whoever does not bear some part of the world’s burden is a diseased unit in humanity. The ultimate aim of all normal progress in social justice is to remove these units. All who have wealth in excess of a reasonable accumulation of the products of their own labor, all who live on endowment and inheritance, all who are sycophants, idlers, or holders of sinecures, must some day, when the terms of justice shall have been worked out, be put to work, and those who will not work shall not eat.

Just by what route the millennial state of simple equity shall come we cannot say, but come it surely will, and the profits of individual labor of brawn or brain shall go to the individual, and the profits arising from the state or social combination shall go to the state, to the people as a whole.

One of the most far-reaching acts of 1914 was the statement by the national congress, in its passage of the anti-trust law preventing the use of the Sherman act against trade unions, that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.”

The implications of this declaration it will be difficult to see for some time. It seems now to strike a blow at the very center of the old system of business under which the world has operated for some six thousand years.

It means that humanity does not consist of employers and endowed persons, of nobles, wealthy people, and professional men — doctors, lawyers, priests, and squires; that culture, schools, courts, and senates are not for these only, and that the employed, the clerks, and workmen, who make the money for these upper classes, are not on the same economic level as the spades and pens they handle; but that a man; any man, and his wage are direct concern of government; that the iron law of supply and demand may govern the grinding of flour, but not of human creatures, and that the brute law of competition shall some time, in some way, be changed to the human law of co-operation.